Call to Arms
by chance on Aug.20, 2010, under dev derby, php, the combine
- Image via Wikipedia
How much code can you generate in a day?
We are actively recruiting participants to take place in a developer event ("Dev Derby") that pits one language against others. It is a day-long programming challenge where teams of developers work to create an application serving a real-world need. Five teams will represent different programming languages—PHP, C#, Ruby, ColdFusion, and Java—to produce a demo application that will be released as open source software.
http://devderby.com/application/
Team Leaders for each language will review applications and select competitively balanced squads. There is no cost to enter, but spots on teams are limited. Winning teams can win prizes and all participants are eligible for discounts to other tech events taking place that week.
The Dev Derby will start and end on Saturday, September 11, 2010, in Bloomington, Indiana. It is part of The Combine (http://thecombine.org), the area’s first major technology conference, and at the start of the BFusion/BFlex conference (http://bflex.info). Dev Derby involves an intense six-hour coding session.
Each challenge submission will be judged by knowledge leaders and representatives of the non-profit organizations benefiting from this work. The criteria spans Design (features and UI choices made), Technical Efficiency (code and performance), Communication (documentation and presentation), and Practical Value (use, adoption, and maintenance).
Prizes will be awarded at the end of the day, following a panel discussion about the development process and the future of application programming.
Dev Derby is situated in The Combine along with other technology-related events, such as Tech Cocktail, Ignite Bloomington, and a variety of of other gatherings. It is hosted by the BFusion/BFlex conference, a two-day hands-on training event from the experts of Adobe Flex and ColdFusion. Dev Derby is inspired by our experience with Startup Weekend in 2008, but with a short day of coding and focused on a specific challenge.
Apply now: http://devderby.com/application/
Valuable Professional Reading
by chance on Aug.11, 2010, under dev derby, development, php, the combine, zend
- Image via Wikipedia
The team leaders for Dev Derby have been asked to list what we consider valuable professional reading. Our book selections are not limited to our respective Languages. I thought I would share my list with everyone.
The first 2 (GoF design patterns and Patterns of enterprise application architecture) really just need to be in every developer's library. The rest are a collections of books I've read and liked as well as recommendations from developers I like and respect. Keith Casey pointed me in the general direction of a lot of these books.I suspect that some of the Dev Derby people will end up contacting various publishers to solicit swag sometime soon.
In other news about Dev Derby, I think that an application for teams should be available to announce sometime soon. I do know we have a deadline for selection approaching and it's kinda hard to select without people to select from.
GoF design patterns:
* ISBN-10: 0201633612
* ISBN-13: 978-020163361
Patterns of enterprise application architecture:
* ISBN-10: 0321127420
* ISBN-13: 978-0321127426
(continue reading...)
Auth/ACL implementation strategies
by chance on Aug.09, 2010, under development, php, security, theory crafting, zend
I'm going to talk more about ACLs than Auth. Auth is simple, it's the ACL that will trip you up. Since both concepts are coupled together when you're making a login system, I feel it's appropriate to at least touch on Auth. What I want to cover is the ways we can create the ACL object to suit needs based on the scale of the project. I'm going to assume that readers have a passing familiarity with using the Auth and Acl objects and may have even implemented them into projects.
(continue reading...)
Dev Derby
by chance on Jul.30, 2010, under announcement, development, php
This morning I accepted a postion as supreme overlord team leader for the PHP team in The Combine's Dev Derby.
What is Dev Derby?
The Combine (http://thecombine.org) is a tech event in Bloomington, IN going on from Sept. 9th-12th. On Sept. 11 there will be a "Dev Derby". This is a one-day programming event which challenges teams, representing different programming languages, to build a web-based application for use by non-profits. The code will be released as open source, giving it life after the day has ended. There will be 5 teams competing. My suspicions say that there will be a Rails team and a CF team in addition to the PHP team.
I'm not sure how finalized some of the information I have on the details are but here is what I do know:
tekx – my thoughts
by chance on Jun.01, 2010, under php, phptek, tekx
It's been about a week or so since tekx ended and I figured that (since I didn't do one last year) I should put my own personal thoughts down. This was my second year at tekx and I was looking forward to the conference and it did not disappoint my expectations. Oh yeah, I'm going to write like my live blogs were and do mostly stream of thought with as little editting as possible. Want the TLDR version? It was fucking awesome, you should berate yourself for not finding a way to go and resolve to be there next year.
Announcing Bloomington PHP
by chance on May.28, 2010, under php, user groups
- Image of PHP Community
I'm going to be ganking some of the announcement structure from Jeremy Kendall's Memphis PHP Announcement who apparently ganked stuff from @ramsey.
I'm proud to announce that Bloomington, Indiana now has a PHP user group. We also acknowledge the greater Central Indiana area. 
The goal of this organization is to take over the world help out php users, dabblers, students , and professionals in the surrounding area while encouraging an active developer community. So far we've garnered a decent amount of members in our google group.The amount of activity behind the scenes of the group has been awesome. Matt Hottell, a Lecturer at Indiana University for the School of Informatics has promised to shamelessly plug notify his students of the PUG (in retrospect, I could've probably shortened the group name) and @_drogers has created a Bloomington Web Developers google group to include more developers in our area that work with more than just PHP. I hope to see more growth in the future and appreciate the efforts given so far. This is, after all, a community effort and I can not do this without the support of the community.
Origin Story
PHP has always been a community experience for me. From the start of learning PHP in my Informatics classes to the mentorship I received from the Resite Sproutbox team, I've seen just how awesome the PHP Community is. It wasn't until last year's php|tek that I wanted to branch that community out into the area I live in. This year's tekx gave me that final push to put things in motion to achieve that dream. I'd like to thank @caseysoftware and @dragonbe for their help and encouragement that made this a reality.
Details
- Since the current members of the google group already meet every Thursday evening at The Alley Bar, I figure why break with tradition. We'll just meet there until the time and need for selecting a quasi-formal arrangement.
- As of right now, we're just using the google group.
- You can follow @bloomingtondevs for community updates and such
- If you're wondering about the kanji (養) that is used for the user icon, it translates to: foster; bring up; rear; develop; nurture. Edit: The romanji for it is "you", which is pronounced "yo" with a long o.
- If you want to be in the the bloomington php user group twitter list that I've made, let me know.
- We have no hashtag, I'd like feedback. So far I'm thinking #btownphp or #bloomingtondevs
Thank you and welcome to Bloomington PHP.
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tek x- closing remarks
by chance on May.21, 2010, under php, phptek, tekx
- Image of Marco Tabini
Closing remarks will be given by Marco Tabini (@mtabini).
User groups are the lifeblood of the PHP community. I need to figure out how to start a user group in the Bloomington, Indiana area. I meant to last year but with figure a public declaration will motivate me more.
This year there was a lot of submissions for sessions. Next year and for conferences in general, if you have an idea for a talk, you should put your paper in. Don't be afraid that people won't want to hear about it.
Short and sweet closing so we get to eat now.
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tekx – cross platform php
by chance on May.21, 2010, under php, phptek, tekx
Talk is by Elizabeth Marie Smith (@auroraeosrose).
PHP is officially supported on:
PHP is starting to drop support for old systems. Like 5.3 won't run on Windows 2000. So try to keep up to date. "If you're running PHP 4, GTFO"
If you write your code right and you get a crazy manager that decides to move, you don't have to deal with the headaches. For the most part, PHP takes care of the hard stuff. You just need to know the edge cases and know the key differences.
tekx – memcache and apc
by chance on May.21, 2010, under php, phptek, tekx
Ben Ramsey (@ramsey) is giving a talk over memcache and APC. You use a cache to reduce the retrieval queries to the database, to reduce the number of requests made to external services, to reduce the time spent computing data and to reduce filesystem access.
Types of caches
- file system
- database
- shared memory
- RAM disk
- object cache (memcached and APC)
- Opcode cache (APC)
Memcached was created for livejournal as a way to solve having to making too many reads to their database. Memcached is a daemon that acts as a simple key/value dictionary.
Who uses it?
- digg
- youtube
- wikipedia
- moontoast
- many others
Principles
- fast asynchronous network I/O
- NOT a persistent data store
- It does not provide redundancy
- data is not replicated across the cluster
- It doesn't handle failover
Daemons are not aware of each other. It does not provide authentication so you shouldn't put themin public areas. They work great on a small and local-area network. A single value can not contain more than 1MB of data. Keys are strings limited to 250 characters.
Simple protocol with storage commands: set,add,replace,append,prepend, cas; retrival: get,gets; deletion: delete;increment/decrements: incr,decr; other: stats,flush_all,version, verbosity, quit.
default port is 11211.
there is a PECL memcache extension, the example is using the PECL memcached example. There is an important distinction. the memcached extention gives you extra information like if the item isn't found.
Missed the APC part of the talk b/c I'm allergic to something there or coming down with something. Either way, was sneezing up a storm and feeling miserable. Skipped rest of the talk so I wouldn't be disruptive.
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tekx – lig’s talk on scalability and mysql
by chance on May.20, 2010, under mysql, php, phptek, tekx
@lig will be talking about mysql 5.5 and scalability this session She is Senior Technical Support Engineer for MySQL.
We will be covering
- semi-synchronous replication
- performance schema
- SIGNAL/RESIGNAL
- more partitioning options
- InnoDB - LOTS of InnoDB (performance and scalability improvements)
In 5.5 InnoDB will be the default!!! WOOT.
Default replication is asynchronous. Meaning master writes to binary log and the slave connects and "pulls" contents of the binary log. Bad thing is if the master crashes, there's no guarantee that a slave has all committed transanction.
Simi-Synchronous Replication is an alternative to asynchronous replication. Midway point between asynchronous and fully syncronous. Master only waits for a slave to receive an event. Don't have to wait for slaves to actually commit.
Performance schema tracks at an extremely low level. Just like Information schema, tables are views or temporary tables. Activation doesn't cause any change in server behavior. This is designed for advanced users.
Think of SIGNAL as an exception, a way to "return" an error. You get exception-handling logic for stored procedures, stored functions, triggers,events and db apps.
RESIGNAL lets you pass error information up. Think of it as a catch. Requres an active handler to execute. Lets you program on your PHP side to catch that very specific handling.
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About Chance Garcia
I have been using PHP since 2005 and doing PHP development professionally since 2006. So far I've managed to occasionally not fail.
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